Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 6. NUDITY AND CLOTHING SHOULD GO TOGETHER
becomes meaningless, because freedom is indivisible. Freedom and responsibility go naturally
together.
If you come and hug me, surely you will feel happy about it. But it is not necessary that I should
also feel the same way. Maybe I am hurt and disturbed by your hug. So if you are entitled to seek
your happiness, I am equally entitled to escape being hurt. This understanding is essential for a
natural, sane and healthy society to come into being. And a natural society will not have laws to be
enforced with the help of magistrates, police and prisons, it will only depend on the understanding
and awareness of its caring membership.
You also want to know what morality is, according to me. To me, respect for another person is
morality. I should respect the other person as much as I respect myself. This is the heart of morality,
and under its wings it covers all other kinds of morality. Respect for the other, the same respect that
I want for myself, is the cornerstone of morality. There is no morality higher than this. The day I put
myself above another I become immoral. The day I consider myself to be the end and treat others
as means, I turn utterly immoral. I am not moral until I truly know that each person is an end unto
himself or herself.
And you say that a husband can be hurt if his wife allows another person to hold her hand or to hug
her. It is just possible. In fact, the institution of the husband is itself a kind of immorality. Marriage
is a declaration of the fact that he has turned the woman he has married into a means for the rest
of her life. It says that a man has bought a woman to establish his ownership over her. But people
cannot be owned, only things can be owned. And when you own a person you reduce him or her
into a thing. And this ownership over people is the worst kind of immorality.
I say that marriage is immoral. While love is moral, marriage is utterly immoral. And there will be no
marriages in a better world. In a better world a man and a woman will live as friends and partners for
the whole of their lives, but there will be no element of a contract, a bargain, a binding, a compulsion
involved in this relationship. This relationship will be wholly based on their love for each other it will
be a reflection of their love and nothing else.
The day love seeks the shelter of law, it courts death. Love dies the day it is turned into a contracted,
legalized marriage. When I tell a woman I am entitled to receive her love because she is my wife, I
am not really asking for her love, I am asserting my legal right of ownership over her. Maybe in that
moment the wife is not in a loving mood, because there are moments of love and they are very few.
Ordinary people cannot be in a loving state twenty-four hours a day; that is possible for rare persons
who become love it self. Ordinary people cannot always be loving they have to wait for their loving
moments, which are few and far between. But the law will not wait for those moments: I can tell my
wife that she should love me right now, because she is my wife – and she will have to yield. And
love dies the moment you are forced to love someone. And if my wife tells me that she is not in a
loving mood, that she does not love me right now, legal troubles will soon arise.
Most of our ethical concepts and moral laws are unnatural, arbitrary and impractical. In the name
of morality we have imposed sheer impossibilities on ourselves. And it is because of them that
immorality is rampant. It seems strange to say that our concept of morality itself is immoral – it is
morality that breeds immorality – but it is a fact. If I love someone today, can I give him or her a
promise that I will not love any other tomorrow? It is impossible to guarantee it. How can I speak
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 112 Osho